Innumerable men and women in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were gripped by the anxiety, often conviction, that they were doomed to go to hell. This condition of mind was commonly enmeshed with such circumstances as parental severity, social exclusion, and economic decline, which seemed to give cogency to a Calvinist theology specializing in the idea of rejection. This book investigates how a menacing discourse compounding theology and social experience constructs subjectivity and shapes texts. Looking at a variety of sources, including puritan autobiographies and works by Bunyan, Burton, Donne, Marlowe, and Milton the book challenges both the assumption of authorial autonomy and the emollience toward protestant culture that have informed most literary studies of the period.

By tracing core discontents, the essays restore the anxiety-ridden radical nature of Puritanism, helping to account for its force in the seventeenth century and the popular and scholarly interest that it continues to evoke. Innovative and challenging in scope and argument, the volume should be of interest to scholars of early modern British and American history, literature, culture, and religion."--BOOK JACKET.

Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin, first published in 1967, set a new standard for Milton criticism and established its author as one of the world's preeminent Milton scholars. The lifelong engagement begun in that work culminates in this book, the magnum opus of a formidable critic and the definitive statement on Milton for our time. How Milton works "from the inside out" is the foremost concern of Fish's book, which explores the radical effect of Milton's theological convictions on his poetry and prose. For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an "aesthetic of testimony": every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama--anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value. Encountering the great poet on his own terms, engaging his equally distinguished admirers and detractors, this book moves a 300-year debate about the significance of Milton's verse to a new level.

Calvinism has been associated with distinctive literary cultures, with republican, liberal and participatory political cultures, with cultures of violence and vandalism, enlightened cultures, cultures of social discipline, secular cultures, and with the emergence of capitalism. Recognizing that Reformed Protestantism did not develop as a uniform tradition, this book assesses the complex character and impact of Calvinism in early modern Europe.

It is widely assumed that science represents the enemy of religious faith. The Soul of Doubt proposes an alternative cause of unbelief: the Christian conscience. Dominic Erdozain argues that the real solvents of orthodoxy in the modern period have been concepts of moral equity and personal freedom generated by Christianity itself.

This project takes the human body and the bodily senses as joints that articulate new kinds of connections between church and theatre and overturns a longstanding notion about theatrical phenomenology in this period.

Melancholia is a commonly experienced feeling, and one with a long and fascinating medical history which can be charted back to antiquity. Avoiding the simplistic binary opposition of constructivism and hard realism, this book argues that melancholia was a culture-bound syndrome which thrived in the West because of the structure of Western medicine since the Ancient Greeks, and because of the West's fascination with self-consciousness. While melancholia cannot be equated with modern depression, Matthew Bell argues that concepts from recent depression research can shed light on melancholia. Within a broad historical panorama, Bell focuses on ancient medical writing, especially the little-known but pivotal Rufus of Ephesus, and on the medicine and culture of early modern Europe. Separate chapters are dedicated to issues of gender and cultural difference, and the final chapter offers a survey of melancholia in the arts, explaining the prominence of melancholia - especially in literature.